Posts Tagged ‘wall street money never sleeps’

The financial crisis has had broad coverage in the media over the past two years, but in contrast to its impact there have been fewer documentaries covering its aftermath compared to the political and war documentaries during the George W. Bush era. The lack of more prominent financial crisis documentaries is probably due to the subject being such an un-sexy and difficult topic to dramatize. Michael Moore, king of drama in docs, gave the economy a whack with his Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), a punchless and overreaching attack on capitalism that turned out to be pretty nominal on drama.

It proved that this story is just that difficult to make appealing to a broad American public, but too important to ignore. The story of the financial meltdown is as broad – involving the entire world’s economy – and as complicated – dealing with complex banking and trading laws – as ever there was for a documentary, but director Charles Ferguson handles the topic without losing focus and consistently stays on message. The film achieves something very difficult in most narrative films, let alone documentaries, which is boiling the underlying problem down to one simple idea: greed is not good. (Sorry, Gordon Gekko). Read More

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is really a film that came out about a year too late. As America bickers over the methods and strategies of economic recovery, we are just now coming into an understanding of the full scope of what took place during the economic meltdown in 2008. While this film exists on its own factious story and morals, the situational setting of its subject matter is impossible to ignore. And while the film is riddled with its problems as a narrative film, such as a flawed plot and flawed acting, it does point out important questions as to what happened, why it happened, and what’s yet to be done with those who are responsible for, and who benefited from, its aftermath.

When living in a country where a large percentage of the population still believes Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on September 11th, 2001, or that President Obama is a Muslim, it’s hard to believe that what happened with the financial meltdown will ever be truly understood. A ton of books have been written on this topic by the very same economists and academics who failed to see it or warn the public beforehand, and now still claim to be experts on the subject. The press is just as incompetent, doing little more than displaying a wrestling match between these “experts” as they fight over details in the margins. What’s left for the rest of us is to reflect on what happened as we continue struggling to recover from its effects. Read More